


Hardly Golden

by theskywasblue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Rewrite, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s15e17 Unity, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:48:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29843820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: If he lets this happen, is it what’s meant to happen? Or if he stops it, was that meant to happen too?(Rewriting Dean and Jack's discussion in the car from 15x17: Unity)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12





	Hardly Golden

**Author's Note:**

> I can't have been the only one watching 15x17 and thinking that - surely at some point - Dean would extract head from ass and realize _you can't ask an actual child to sacrifice himself for the world, Dean. What is this, the John Winchester greatest hits collection?_
> 
> Of course this was before it became obvious that TPTB were planning to nuke the show from orbit. Oops.
> 
> Anyway, sometimes you have feelings, and you write them.
> 
> (I can't say I actually re-watched the episode to confirm details in this, because it pains me, so any factual errors are just going to be there. Canon is dead to me.)

They pull over. The road is too dark, it feels like a great, snaking nothingness. Dean sits with his hands on the wheel, ten and two. He doesn’t remember being taught that. He does remember having to get in behind the wheel at twelve, legs too short, trying desperately to get his feet down to the pedals; the smell of gunpowder, the hot iron of Dad’s blood soaking into the seat. 

Jack sits with the rib on his lap, hands curled around, but not touching it. 

The engine ticks. Dean opens his mouth, closes it again, thinks, suddenly, of the first time he’d pointed a gun at a living thing, and pulled the trigger - the hot smell of oil and cordite, the ache in his arms and the ringing in his ears; the way he lay awake afterward, shaking silently, feeling his heart rattle, tasting blood at the back of his mouth, like he was the one with buckshot in his chest. 

“I’m ready,” Jack says, but he’s not. Dean knows that he’s not. There’s no way to _be_ ready. Dean was never ready; every time he thought he was, it wasn’t true. It’s so easy to forget that Jack is younger than he looks, that he doesn’t have any of the things to mark the passage of his life that Dean had, even when he was the age Jack looks. 

It isn’t fair, it never is. It never has been.

Dean remembers, like the edges of a nightmare, a ghoul hunt gone wrong when he was nineteen. He’d made it back to the motel, but Dad wasn’t there, just Sam, ashen-faced at the sight of his brother, bleeding out on the carpet. Dean doesn’t remember the trip to the hospital, if Sam drove, or called an ambulance. He woke up three days later in the ICU, with Sam asleep in the chair next to his bed, and Bobby standing in the doorway, looking small in the face of John Winchester’s shadow. 

_“- You’re gonna put him out there with those things - ”_

_“If he can’t handle himself, that’s on him.”_

_“He’s your **son** , John. It’s on you.”_

If he lets this happen, is it what’s meant to happen? Or if he stops it, was that meant to happen too? Dean feels like the ground is spinning under his seat; like the dark around them is breathing. He knows he hasn’t loved Jack right - that he doesn’t really know how to love _anyone_ right; he only knows how to watch them burn up. 

His phone sits silent on the dash, like dynamite on a long, torturous fuse. And the rib sits there in Jack’s lap, nested in his trembling fingers. 

So Dean reaches out and takes it. 

“Dean - what are you -“

He’s out of the car before Jack can finish, across the highway in long strides. He doesn’t look, doesn’t think - of an eighteen wheeler screaming out of the dark or a bolt of lighting from the heavens, or anything - just hits the damp gravel of the far shoulder with both feet, wings back his arm and hurls the rib into long grass. It rises in a shallow arc, the plastic fluttering, falls, vanishes. 

“What are you doing?” Jack shouts, almost hysterical, frozen with the heels of his shoes on the double yellow line and the wind tearing at his hair. “Why did you do that?!”

Dean turns back towards the car, not relieved, but shaking a little anyway - an aborted surge of adrenaline whistling through his veins. “Forget it, kid. Just forget it. This isn’t happening.”

“But Billie said -“

“ _Forget_ about Billie for a damned minute, okay. _I_ said it’s not going down like this. You’re not turning yourself into some kind of suicide bomb -“

“You said I wasn’t family, so why does it matter?” And Dean feels his heart catch, painfully, against his ribs. _Yeah_ he thinks, _yeah I did say that_. But there isn’t enough time in the world - literally - to explain that he didn’t _mean_ it, that it wasn’t for Jack to hear, or even Sam. It was for Dean; a botched attempt to amputate his own heart. 

Jack’s hands clench at his sides, his jaw works, grinding his teeth together like he’s furious, but his voice cracks. “I have to do this, Dean! It’s the only thing I can do! I want to be _good_ again!”

Later, Dean will think back and hate himself for the way Jack flinches as Dean grabs for him - both hands, fisting in the kid’s jacket, almost pulling him right off his feet. Dean pulls him in and holds on, so tight that Jack makes a tiny, aborted sound that’s more pain than surprise. There’s two heartbeats of tension, but no resistance after that; he curls into Dean and Dean wraps one arm around his shoulder and presses the other hand to the back of his skull, where his hair is shorn short and bristle-soft. He feels small in Dean’s arms, like a little boy he would have been if he hadn’t been born with the whole of creation sitting on his shoulder, and he trembles and digs his fingers into Dean’s jacket and mumbles something into Dean’s shirt.

“What?” Dean rasps, hoarse and thick, half- choked by his own heart. Jack lifts his head and his soft, bright eyes are already spilling over, salt water tracking down his cheeks.

“I don’t -“ he gulps air, looks away guiltily. “I don’t want to die, Dean, I don’t -“

He pulls Jack in again, tight, but gentler this time, lets him shake his way towards relief, or exhaustion, maybe both. “Okay,” he tells Jack, his voice a whisper. “It’s okay, kid. It’s okay.”

The Impala’s interior light spills across the cold highway and the wind makes the open driver’s door creak, just a little. From the other side of the highway, Dean can hear his cell phone ringing, ringing, ringing. 

-End-


End file.
